Chocolate Air...

I am an eighth grade language arts/social studies teacher in Ohio. I started this blog to keep track of all the great books I read so I could share them with my students. I now use this blog in class for book talks so my students can keep up to date on the world of books that I so dearly love. It is my hopes that this blog will continue to be a source of exciting book finds for my current and former students to explore. Send me your comments! I look forward to hearing from you!

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Ghetto Cowboy

"You never know what someone will do with his life once he finds himself."

From G. Neri's website:"When Cole's mom dumps him in mean streets of Philly
to live with the dad he's never met, the last thing Cole expects to see is a
horse--let alone a stable full of them. He may not know much about cowboys, but
what he knows for sure is that cowboys ain't black and they don't live in the
inner city! But on Chester
Avenue, horses are a way of life, and soon
Cole's days of goofing off and skipping school in Detroit have been
replaced by shoveling muck and trying not to get stomped on.

“Crazy as it may seem, the lifestyle grows on Cole, and he
starts to think that maybe life as a ghetto cowboy isn’t so bad. But when the
City threatens to shut down the stables—and take away the horse that Cole has
come to think of as his own—he knows that he has to fight back.

“Inspired by the real-life inner-city horsemen of Philadelphia and Brooklyn, Ghetto Cowboy
is a timeless urban western about learning to stand up for what’s right—the Cowboy Way.”

Hold your horses and stampede to your local library or bookstore! Wrangle yourself a copy of Ghetto Cowboy and giddy-up reading.Stop. Hold the horse puns. This is not your typical horse story. In fact, I cannot wait to give this book to some of my "traditional horse story readers" in class. They will be amazed at the inner-city horse world that opens up in front of them.I found this story interesting from the beginning and believable until the very end. I was rooting for Cole and Harper, Jamaica Bob and Tex, and even Smush and Snapper. Kids will love entering this cowboy world and learning the Cowboy Way.